Invisible Killer

While the Japanese government continues to say that the yellow rain seen in Japan was simply “pollen,” many have been reminded of a very similar occurrence after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Almost on que, the Japan Meteorological Agency has confirmed the rain to be pollen after receiving hundreds of calls from concerned citizens.

The ‘‘yellow rain’’ seen Wednesday in the Kanto region surrounding Tokyo was caused by pollen, not radioactive materials as many residents had worried, the Japan Meteorological Agency said Thursday, reported the Japan Times.

1. Indian Point

Location: Buchanan, NY (24 miles north of New York City)

The price of the Beefy Crunch Burrito had gone up from 99 cents to $1.49 and the man at the Rigsby Road Taco Bell drive-thru had just ordered seven.

The fast food customer was so disgruntled by the price hike he shot an air gun at the manager, displayed an assault rifle and pistol while in the restaurant’s parking lot, fled as police were called, and pointed one of his weapons at three officers who pulled him over. Fleeing when they opened fire, he barricaded himself in his hotel room — all over $3.50 plus additional tax.

Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.

The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

Treacher-Collins syndrome

Based on a rough estimate, a person standing on soil with 163,000 Bq/kg of cesium-137 would receive about 150 millisieverts per year of radiation, says Chen. This is well above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard of 50 millisieverts per year for an evacuation. (Per day, it’s 0.41 millisieverts, which is equivalent to four chest x-rays.) But Chen adds, “one point [of data] doesn’t mean that much.”

The hot spot is similar to levels found in some areas affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in the former Soviet Union. Assuming the radiation is no more than 2 centimeters deep, Chen calculates that 163,000 Bq/kg is roughly equivalent to 8 million Bq/m2. The highest cesium-137 levels in some villages near Chernobyl were 5 million Bq/m2.

Some of the most shocking allegations against Epstein surfaced only after the conclusion of an FBI probe, in civil suits brought by his victims: for example, the claim that three 12-year-old French girls were delivered to him as a birthday present. But the feds did identify roughly 40 young women, most of them underage at the time, who described being lured to Epstein’s Palm Beach home on the pretense of giving a “massage” for money, then pressured into various sex acts, as well as the “Balkan sex slave” Epstein allegedly boasted of purchasing from her family when she was just 14. More recently, a big cash payment from Mail on Sunday coaxed one of Epstein’s main accusers out of anonymity to describe what she claims were her years as a teenage sex toy. This victim, Virginia Roberts, produced a photo of herself with Prince Andrew in 2001 and reported that Epstein paid her $15,000 to meet the prince.

In his Wall Street Journal review of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul, a biography of Mohandas Gandhi, conservative historian Andrew Roberts calls Gandhi “a ceaseless self-promoter”, a “sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist” and accuses the revered Indian leader of repeatedly botching his nation’s independence movement. In subsequent paragraphs, Roberts goes on to call him a racist, a child molester, and a hypocrite.

Roberts lambasts Gandhi for sharing his bed with young, naked women into his 70’s, but then directs us to the section of Great Soul that details a passionate love affair between Gandhi and another man, “Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908.”

Upon viewing the first A-bomb explosion light up the dark New Mexico sky in 1945, Manhattan Project supervising physicist Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He hadn’t opened Pandora’s box so much as he forever locked homo sapiens inside Pandora’s gas chamber. Humanity was smart enough to develop nuclear technology but nowhere near emotionally mature enough to handle it responsibly. And these days it may only require one socially awkward hacker or a single maladjusted postdoctoral physics scholar to set the chain reaction going. It’s as easy as alpha, beta, gamma. You can’t paint a happy face on a mushroom cloud. Whether or not you believe in original sin, nuclear technology may be the final sin.